Solution to Epic Games Launcher Wizard Ended Prematurely

Tue
04
Nov 2025

I recently stumbled upon a problem while trying to install the Epic Games Launcher on a fresh installation of Windows 11. The installation wizard was showing the message: “Epic Games Launcher Wizard ended prematurely because of an error.” and the launcher wasn’t installing. Trying to install it from the Microsoft Store was also failing, showing the error code 0x8A150049.

Solution: Create a different user account - one without a space in the username. Change its type to Administrator. Sign out, sign in to that account, and use it to install the launcher. After that, you can return to your main account and delete the temporary one. The Epic Games Launcher will remain installed and ready to use.

Full story: I got a new PC with a fresh installation of Windows 11. I started installing all the necessary software and my programming environment. (For the list of Windows apps I recommend, see my older post: My Favorite Windows Apps.) When I tried to install the Epic Games Launcher, I was surprised that after completing the setup wizard, the app didn’t appear in my system. Only on the second attempt did I carefully read the message that appeared on the final page:

Epic Games Launcher Wizard ended prematurely because of an error.

I searched the Internet and tried many solutions, but none of them helped:

Restarting my machine.
Launching the command msiexec /i PATH\EpicInstaller-18.12.1.msi as Administrator.
Installing Epic Games Launcher from the Windows Store - it failed with error code 0x8A150049.
Deleting all “Epic”-related folders from "C:\Users\MY_LOGIN".
Deleting all “Epic”-related folders from "C:\Program Files" and "C:\Program Files (x86)" - I found nothing.
Deleting Epic-related entries from the Windows Registry - I found nothing.

Finally, somewhere on the Internet I found information that the installer leaves a text log file in "c:\Users\MY_LOGIN\AppData\Local\Epic Games\Epic Online Services\EOSInstaller\Logs\EOSInstaller-DATE-TIME.log". I opened it and found the following messages inside:

[2025.11.04-10.00.56:329][---]Log file opened.
[2025.11.04-10.00.56:329][---]FApplication: Version 1.2.26 ran with extract=C:\Users\Adam Sawicki\AppData\Local\Temp\7a4515cf-dde6-44f9-afb4-b5b1e0dee697
[2025.11.04-10.00.56:348][---]FApplication: Extract mode
[2025.11.04-10.00.56:349][---]FApplication: Extracting bundled MSI
[2025.11.04-10.00.56:349][---]FApplication: Could not create temp directory "C:\\Users\\Adam" system:183
[2025.11.04-10.00.56:349][---]FApplication: Failed to build MSI
[2025.11.04-10.00.56:349][---]Log file closed.

The line "Could not create temp directory "C:\Users\Adam"" gave me a clue that the installer likely fails because of the space in my Windows username, which is “Adam Sawicki”. That’s how I came up with the solution of using a Windows account without a space in the username.

After all, this is clearly a bug in Epic’s code. They shouldn’t rely on whether a username contains spaces or other characters. They probably just forgot to properly escape the path with quotation marks (" ") somewhere in their code. Epic, please fix it!

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